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THE MARINER AS A MUSE FOR FREUD Through this complex poem it is no easy task to contrive one concise explanation that will sum up the poem The Rhyme Of the Ancient Mariner has strong undertones of God the creator the animals in his kingdom and the basic emotional circumstances that make up human existence While these are broad topics they can be broken down into cause and effect situations using some of Freuds methodology in Ego Psychology Freud explained the way the human mind uses defense mechanisms and there are some examples of these mechanisms in The Rhyme Of the Ancient Mariner Freuds ideas on displacement rationalization and projection can be used to understand some of the actions seen in the poem The poem starts out in the present day when the Mariner uninvited attends a wedding reception where he takes aside one of the guests and begins to spin his tale of a see adventure which appears to be part fact hallucination and religion The mariner and his fellow seamen are stranded in the middle of the ocean with no wind There boat has not moved in weeks the ocean is calm and they are at natures Gods mercy When suddenly out of the blue comes a glorious albatross In an almost magical way the sails flood with wind and the sea changes from a calm portrait of water into a lively swell of waves and white caps Almost all the crew begins to rejoice in the albatross and the whether which they believe it brought Only the Ancient Mariner is anything but happy over the birds presence and he shoots the bird with a harpoon killing it The reason the Mariner killed the bird is not emphasized but a mask of a reason is that he thought the bird was responsible for the bad whether The other sailors turn on the Mariner blaming him for the return of the

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